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As a longtime fan of comedian Chris Rush (the Caucasian guy, not
the duskier fellow), I'd have to think that our Blessed Savior might
not ever have bothered to embrace firearms ownership for anything
more than purely recreational purposes, because (to paraphrase
Mr. Rush in his depiction of the Dominican nuns who taught him
in parochial school):

"All [He'd] have to do is point to you and say 'Him!'

...and your eye would fall out."

I mean, could you imagine that Finger of God on a combat pistol
range?

Nick Merrill wants to create the world's first encrypted internet
service provider (ISP) with secure cell phone service that will also
legally fight government orders to give up client information. His
experience fighting a secret "National Security Letter" to do just
that with another company he worked for lead him to this idea. Read
the
article on CNET here.

He is looking to crowdsourcing the funding to help get it off the
ground. The link to that is
here.

Consider taking a long, hard look at this and helping if you find his
idea worthwhile, even if it is as little as spreading the word!

I have used Ubuntu Linux at work and it seems to be very stable.
You may want to take a look at it. I still prefer Microsoft
Office (the XP version) to Open Office thought. I don't like
the "ribbon" that the newer versions of Office use; it takes
up too much screen real estate. I never figured out if you
can go back to the old interface.

Although I have always been a strong advocate of ocean exploration
reading Arthur Clarke's The Deep Range was almost a religious
experience for me in junior high schoolI disagree with the major
contention in this article (for which it would be useful to have a
URL). Getting our species firmly and permanently established in space
is vitally important to its survival.

It is the seas that can wait, however regrettably. I am not going
to take the word of someone as politically and philosophically
screwed up as James Cameron that they cannot. If we enjoyed the
prosperity that a truly free society would bring us, we could afford
to exploreand exploitboth realms. But then getting our eggs
out of one basket wouldn't be quite as important.

If I can find the time and energy (somewhere), I will consider
this matter at greater length in _The Libertarian Enterprise_. For
now, simply consider that all the world's thermonuclear weapons are
in the hands, effectively, of demented two-year-olds. We desperately
need to get a significant portion of our gene pool as far away from
them as possible, and the bottom of the Marianas Trench isn't far
away enough.

Before mucking with the OS like that, back everything up. Then you
have a nice fresh backup when the inevitable occurs. No need for
panic.

I know, that sounds so smart. I actually was doing the same sort of
thing, and the inevitable did occur. No Problemo, just booted puppy
linux, got my one terabyte USB drive and plugged it in, opened up a
console window, and cut and pasted from the command line I had
stored in a readme.txt file (basically "dd" piped to gzip) to
create the command to reverse the process. Except I inadvertently
cut the carriage return from the end of the line, so that when it
pasted it executed before I could edit it and wiped out the restore
file I was depending on to reload my hard drive!

I think there must be a god. I can't imagine humans do this sort of
thing every day with nothing and no one around to laugh at us for
doing it. Surely we must be some being's entertainment.

PS: Really? No Linux is good enough yet? I have been enjoying Arch
Linux. But it's really good for someone who enjoys tinkering.

[ No Linux works well on my particular hardware mix of oldish
and newish (no driver for my HP 1920 x 1080 monitor for example,
making everything look bad). And the hot-spot for the mouse arrow
is NOT at the point, but about half-way along the thing's length!
Editor ]

[ Links now fixed. My grip on things is looser, making me somewhat
of a loser. Or maybe I just can't speal? Er.... Anyway, now I find
that my complete copy of the master file for the Enterprise
that is on my USB flash drive is corrupted. Just one thing after
another.Editor ]